Butoh training contents

Theory

Introductory talks on Butoh and Japanese aesthetics including recommended bibliography, art and visual materials.

Physical training

The center, balance and collapse. Gravity, weight and the weightless.The body in relation to the ground. Breath: the primordial source of movement. Expansion and contraction. Inside and outside the body. Streams of energy.

Invisible technique

Work through different imagery, concrete animate and inanimate objects internalizing them and translating them into movement.

Creation

The third part focuses on discovering the relevance of Butoh into the dancer, actor’s and artist own practice finding a specific area of interest to be reflected in the creation of an art piece in any media of personal choice (dance, performance, theatre, photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation, etc).

Essential concepts

The empty body

The body does not move intentionally. It is rather moved by something. The body is a blank canvas subject to infinite transformations. The body is a black charcoal absorbing the light. “What is expressed should not be something that a dancer tries to display. A dancer should concentrate on absorbing.” **Quote by Nario Gohda from Yukio Waguri’s site: http://www.otsukimi.net/koz/e_yw_antho.html

The desublimated body

Decay is the dance of the living organisms. We stand in-between life and death. The beauty of fading out in dance. Different ways of vanishing. Snow melts, a rain of cherry tree petals falls and the moon hides by quarters.

Beauty in the horror of the grimace

The distorted, the uncanny and the grotesque. The coexistence of the painful and the pleasant.

The Inside

Movement emerges from a remote zone which hides in the darkness of our own body.

The unleashed body

Movement without thinking in the search for the body’s own unconscious impulses.

The Avant-Garde body

Fragmentation and dissociation. Influence of modernist art in dance. The hands, the face and the feet going their own separated ways. The mask.

The power of the gaze in dance

From a particular gaze a determined way of walking flourishes. Eyes migrate through different body parts. The empty eyes. The whole body as a big eye. Seeing through the other senses. I see with the soles of my feet. To see becomes to feel.

The ground

The worshiped surface from which everything originates.

Presence

Practice one’s own existence into space. Carrying one´s own body weight. Connecting with the outside. The ego melts into space. Becoming the universe.

The other

Internalizing different beings and their existence. Transforming from one state into the other. Female and male energy, animal spirits, animated and inanimate objects.

Sensing

To sense the essence of things generating movement from our relation with different materials, textures, atmospheres, temperatures,light and darkness.

The space in-between

Importance of the invisible space between things. Air circulates around hidden joints and cavities. The space can become small. Hands can turn diminutive. The smallest detail makes a big difference. Subtlety and delicacy.